“What do we do with grief? Lug it; lug it.” – Ada Limόn
everything looks dead under the dense sky
& the light rain is a chill spray on our grief.
it’s grandpa’s birthday. mom’s eyes & mine are fastened
to his gravestone, fresh daisies before it.
it’s been twenty years since death swiped his breath,
still mom breaks like dawn every time.
let’s agree that loss is a chained rock pulling
the body to the riverbed.
& it grows pain into a field of wildflowers.
& the tongue becomes a sponge of saltwater.
I catch a dove looking at us from a light pole
& I think of it as an angel in disguise.
or perhaps grandpa’s spirit in the form of a bird
watching us flower his grave this decade.
I have nothing to say other than mom misses you.
he knows I don’t remember him—
I was too young to feel the blade of his passing.
our gaze touch for a second & then he shoots
for the sky & fades into gray heavens.
mom’s cold hand grips mine & I interpret
that as let’s go. we can say that even if the wind
sweeps the photographs off the wall,
it can’t wipe them off its memory.
we walk home, it drizzles on.
Praise Osawaru (he/him) is a writer of Bini descent. A Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, and Nina Riggs Poetry Award nominee; his work appears in Agbowó, FIYAH, Frontier Poetry, Down River Road, The Maine Review, and Uncanny Magazine, among others. He’s the first-place winner of the 2021 Valiant Scribe Poetry Prize and a finalist for the 2021 Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize & the 2021 Dan Veach Prize For Younger poets. He’s a Contributing Editor for Barren Magazine and a reader for Chestnut Review. Find him on Instagram & Twitter: @wordsmithpraise.